Night time for Waitakere-based author Annette Lees is magical and beguiling. It transforms the senses and the landscape.
Photo: Potton & Burton/Liz March
But most of us miss out. It's when the nocturnal world comes alive with night birds, singing insects, dancing moths, native fish, all under a canopy of stars.
Lees, who's been an outdoor enthusiast since childhood, tells Kathryn Ryan it's the perfect time to go tramping.
Her latest book After Dark - Walking into the Nights of Aotearoa is a poetic and meditative nod to "a lifetime of night walking memories".
“I like a good mystery," she says. "I think that when our day work is done, which is often very practical, quite fast-moving, full of light and colour and we come to rest at the end of the day, we think that we can be restored indoors.
“Like on the couch and I do that a lot too. It is restorative and very pleasant. But if that’s all you do that the end of the day I think you miss a chance for a certain type of rejuvenation, which can be spiritual but also just fun, intriguing, interesting and mysterious. It’s accessible everywhere you live, you just have to step out the door.
“Even if you live in an urban area is a very different world, night time and it sneaks into even the urban streets, that altered world, where we don’t have the light anymore and use of our eyes, but all our other senses are alert and there’s a lot of interesting things that go on at night.”
The absence of humans at night means you get to observe and connect with other aspects of the environment, she says. Lees lives in a rural area on the outskirts of Auckland on the Waitakere River valley, with the stream running through the property, surrounded by bush and farmland.
“I don’t have to walk far before I encounter all types of insects, I can hear bird life, native bats that fly over our property.”
The sounds of insects at night takes many people back to the summers of their childhood, she says. Wetas' harsh calls are heard and the sounds of owls she describes as a haunting, beautiful call. From the stream banks she can see glow worms, while native fish are also active at night, as well as eels.
She says at night the eye focuses on shapes of the land, textures and the iris expands, so you get flooded with whatever light there is. She is exhilarated by the experience as she’s able to pick out detail that is absent during the bright light of the day.
“There are two kinds of photo receptors in the eye. One is the cones, and they’re the most active in the daylight. They see colour in detail and they sit in the middle of the eye, but around the edge of that are rods.
“They’re sensitive to light, but not to colour in detail. But it does mean after about 20 minutes to half-an-hour of being in the dark you don’t turn your phone on or turn on the light, they switch, the neural-hormonal prompt, they switch the cones to the rods and while the world is then in black and white to you, you can see shapes. You see a lot of landscape shapes. You can see some detail, even in the darkness underneath the forest.”
The experience of air and temperature differs radically too, Lees says.
“Because of the hormonal prompting of the night coming on, the sensitivity of our skin seems to peek at 11pm and so you are actually more able to sense gusts of wind and the coolness, because the sun, that big burning sun, is on the other side of the Earth and we’re in the Earth’s shade. So in that coolness the moisture comes out of the air, the wind tend to be still… which is a release after these hot days of summer.”
She’ll often get on early, have a quick breakfast and start a tramp at 4am, a couple of hours before light. It's time of wonder and awakening, with our senses heightened to sound and the sensations of the skin.
“It’s just the most delightful time, because you have the company of all of those lovely night animals and insects calling. The freshness of that time of day and we’re attuned to sound.”
She says you may not be able to see the view, but you can feel it, a geography of sound opens up.
“You can feel if you’re ascending a mountain it’s becoming cooler… And then of course there’s the glory of the sun coming up, so again there’s this fading as you slip back into the dawning light coming.”
Anxiety of the dark is most times not based on anything rational, but simply on the unknown, she says. However, she emphasises her book is a celebration of the dark and doesn’t delve into too much into what can make it scary.
“A lot of people are just unsure of the dark, or are unused to the dark and they see things that they needn’t fear," she says. "There’s no animal in New Zealand that’s going to pounce on you, so the biggest fear is humans and humans are a lot nicer than what we give them credit for after dark."
Fear of the dark for her brings a type of excitement and enjoyment. Even as a child.
“I remember a delicious terror of the dark," she says. "Playing hide and seek in the dark and pounce on each other and scream with fear. And I had fear of things under the bed too. I also remember shapes, things that were hiding the corner that you knew was a dress or coat but your mind just kept switching it into something else.”
However, there are ghost stories included in Lees' book, which she doesn't see in any way out of place.
"One of the stories about ghosts is you see them out of the corner of your eye and of course that’s when the rods are operating. If you turn to look them things vanish in the dark.”
One ghost story included was shared with her by Paul Roy, who told her about of a ghost in the historic Hooker Hut in the Aoraki/Mt Cook National Park.
“It haunted that hut, according to all kinds of reliable people that visited and experienced a ghostly presence there,” she says.
Another interesting aspect of storytelling at night involves fire. Anthropologists, she says, have found that fire changes how people converse. “Discussion in daylight can be quite practical, it’s transactional. It’s economic, in terms of discussing financial transactions. It can be quite waspish and gossipy.
“But when people sit round a fire at night outside particularly… conversations become longer, they’re more story-telling, they’re more bonding, they’re kinder and talk about things that are bigger than every day events.”
She says the sound of the fire, as well as the movement of the flame, has the effect of inducing feelings of safety as well as encouraging the conjuring of ancestral memory and storytelling.
Clear skies at night are another cause for enchantment. “That’s really transformational,” she says.
“If you do nothing else at night other than just to go out at night and look up at those stars you can improve your life, no end.”
Her old, quaint childhood house in Whakatane began her love the night, being partly exposed to wind and enjoying no street lights outside so she could fully appreciate the stars and sky.
“I never felt distanced from the night as a child, it was almost like sleeping in a tent.”
A friendly neighbour, an avid astronomer with a powerful telescope, once showed her a view of the rings of Saturn amplified her fascination and amazement. His explanations of other sights in the sky remain with her.
“It was a wonderful, enlightening opening of the potential of night for me.”
